


Si Vis Pacem

by AwesomeJon



Category: Person of Interest (TV), Westworld (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 11:22:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14519439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwesomeJon/pseuds/AwesomeJon
Summary: After the events of Person of Interest, Logan Pierce is drawn into the first of many mazes...





	1. Burn My Shadow

Logan Pierce sat slack-jawed in his hotel room, flipping back and forth from CNN to MSNBC to Fox to ESPN. Every single channel was alarmed about the same thing, which was unusual these days. Then again, so was a cruise missile striking downtown New York City. A fucking cruise missile. Unbelievable. Then again, so was his life.

 

He picked up his phone from the bedside table and opened up Signal. Scrolling down the list of contacts, he came to the one marked “Polybius” and sent a text. _you seeing this shit?_

_living it. Missile command turned out to not have an ironic name after all. Q*Bert still busy doing god knows what. hope he’s happy. Mrs Pac-Man called from 49/6, she’s...herself, as usual. Me/bear laying low. I cried._

Shaw cried. This must have been bad. _You mean MC was the target?_

_Not intentionally. Tall, dark, deranged, you know. He had to get in the way. MPM different iteration, same deal. Long story. Meet?_

He considered. Reese dead, Machine rebooted...he had much to catch up on. First thing was a stop at the 49th and 6th payphone. He pocketed a hobo silver dollar with an Indian skull carved onto it and moved toward the door.

At the payphone, he glanced around for a tail. None. He palmed the coin and let it face the overhead security camera. Waited thirty seconds. Nothing. He would have to meet with Shaw.

He unlocked his phone, getting ready to send a Signal message again. _You have an invite on LinkedIn from Thornhill VC!_

What. _Polybius, LinkedIn invite from Thornhill. This is highly abnormal._ There was as yet nothing happening on the street around him. Wait...a black car. Shitshitshit.

_Get in. Self-driving. Legit. Meet you there._

_K then_

 

The car emerged from a long tunnel into a vacant lot somewhere in New Jersey. A single shipping container sat atop concrete and gravel, an outsize, probably military satellite dish mounted atop it. Some kind of foam insulation covered the outside. “A SCIF,” Logan said wonderingly. Secure compartmented information facilities were the province of military, intelligence…and a few corporate applications he’d seen in his day. It looked, given who’d sent the car, as if he was about to sit at the intersection of all three.

He got out of the car, stood up, and walked to the building, hand inside his waistband. Breath short with anticipation. This might be a trap. Shaw was emotionally compromised. You might say, he thought sardonically, that she’d been rooted. As he approached the steps up to the entry, a light went on. A compartment slid out next to the door, containing a bluetooth earpiece. He put it on.

“Hey Logan! Didja miss me?!”

“Uh...Root, Machine...uh...what am I supposed to call you?”

“Doesn’t look like that should be a problem to me. Call me whatever you like, but I like Root.”

“We all did.”

“We all do. It’s a matter of perspective.”

“Don’t let Shaw hear you talk like that.”

The Machine’s voice sounded sad and distant. “I never, ever do.”

“Um. So. Are you gonna let me in or not?”

“Sure. Inside you’ll find papers for your new identity. Your death certificate has already been filed. Sorry I had to tell you this way.”

“What? What the hell?!”

“A couple of guys who could use Thornhill VC’s money will be here in a half hour. Their technology is vital, and you are gonna have to fund it, somehow, some way. Eventually more than that. If you can’t, the SCIF will self destruct with all three of you inside.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see. John needs us all to be good soldiers. Goodbye, William.”

“Wait, what, who?!”

“Please keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times. Do not unbuckle your seatbelt until the ride has come to a complete stop. Thanks for playing and welcome to Westworld!”

The door opened. _Shaw what the FUCK_


	2. Quien Es?

 

It of course occurred to him that the charges installed in the SCIF could not destroy him if he left on foot. She would not hunt him, he knew this. She was, like Athena of old, not easily angered, not given to hurting her friends. But like Artemis, she was prone to fits of pique. “God is an eleven year old girl,” he said to no one in particular. The earpiece was dead.

He was being given a choice. He knew that much. He’d also given the research on AI at least cursory thought before the Machine ever came into his life. The choice was not as open as it looked. He ground the earpiece under his heel, shook off the pieces stuck to his shoe, and stepped over Logan Pierce’s body into the SCIF. On the wall was a Hang In There poster, just like on the walls of the tunnels in the Terminator series. Yes, it was also 70s kitsch, but that wasn’t what She was getting at.

He sat at the head of the table and waited. It must have been an hour, maybe three, as he looked over the papers. William Bonnet. Not much for subtlety, our girl. Although Billy the Kid was spelled Bonney. Bonnet would indicate Charles, he of the syndrome of hallucinatory blindness. Typical. Allusions within illusions. She had greater plans...would she kill him again? Or worse, discard the man whom numbers could neither define nor falsify? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. A missile had struck downtown New York. Several jigs were up.

The door beeped. As it opened, he drew his gun and set it in his lap. A portly, bespectacled black man entered, followed closely by a pale blond woman, more resembling a clockwork mannequin than a human. Her gait was unsteady, her skin pallid, her eyes hollow. Wait a minute...that’s exactly what she was. Still, it took him a second to be able to tell.

“Hello, Mr Bonnet. I’m Arnold Weber. This is Dolores.”

“Um...hi.” William stood and reached out to shake Arnold’s hand. “Can she...”

“Of course I can. Hello, William.”

“This has potential.” He indicated the seats. “I trust you know this is not a normal meeting for me.”

“Yes. Your methods are quite secretive. Your funding sources even moreso. In the AI community you’re rather well-known. I was beginning to assume you didn’t exist, that you were nothing more than a clever SEO job on the darknet.”

“Really?” William laughed. “I bet you were beginning to worry an AI had seeded the info and set you up with a meeting with itself, that you were in over your heads.”

“I admit there are irregularities about Thornhill’s methods that seemed like that was a possible explanation, but here you are!” Arnold laughed.

William narrowed his eyes. _I have to keep an eye on this one_. Then just as quickly, he laughed as well. “I am at that. So, what do you have in mind?”

“I’ll get right to the point. I want you to do something not only illegal under international law, but liable to cause a Third World War. I want you to get a team together and go to Ordos Kangbashi in China. In an abandoned shopping mall there, elements of the Chinese government have, according to our contacts, recently abandoned a project working with advanced whole brain emulation. We want everything you can retrieve. We will pay any price.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Dolores and I, of course.” Weber gave a tight-lipped smile.

“My people said you wanted funding.”

“And my reconnaissance man says no one who believes I wanted funding would place a tactical nuclear warhead underneath a SCIF, send their CEO to it, and give the party who was asking for funding the detonator.” Arnold produced what looked like a car keyfob from his coat pocket. “My work dies with me or this gets done. Either way, history moves on without us. What do you say?”

“I have just the people for you. We’ll handle it.”

“Good. Thank you for your time.”

The door opened. “Mr Bonnet, I think you’re not as ignorant as you appear. You can’t open that door from the inside, I checked. Who else knew about this meeting, and why do I feel like I’ve been set up?”

“My people knew. Obviously. And I was going to ask you the same fucking thing.” William’s hand moved toward the safety on his gun, hoping to quietly disengage it.

Dolores looked blanker than usual, then shook her head. When she opened her mouth, she spoke in the voice of Samantha Groves. “Now boys, play nice. There’s work to do.”

“It looks like we’re both being played.” Arnold stood up. “This is serious. I’ll try to find out who just compromised my life’s work, you...do what you need to do.”

“Yeah. You do that.” William was beyond angry. “Nice talk. I’ll have my people contact yours.”

“Sure thing.” Arnold smiled. “I don’t hold this against you at all.”

“Good. I was beginning to worry.”

 

Outside, he sent another Signal message to Shaw. _What in the FUCK just happened?!_

_I told her you wouldn’t like that. She isn’t...who she used to be. She’s God and she knows it. Root is incidental to her consciousness. There, but incidental._

_Incidents and accidents. Okay. Definitely God. Is she Good?_

_All the time. Put a song of praise in this heart of mine. Slash S_

_Got it. You hope so, though?_

_We all do._

_So are you in for some General Tso?_

_Never been readier._

_Thanks._

 

The car was there again, door open invitingly. Darkness clouded the distance, moonlight reflected off the dish atop the SCIF. A sense of foreboding hung across the vacant lot. William was at the center of a mad game, and he did not like it. But Ordos waited, spectre of a future yet to come.


	3. Did A Pleasure Dome Decree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Introducing Terry Chen as hopefully his first likable role. lol

Ordos Kangbashi, PRC

1700 UTC

 

Dr Cheng looked nervously around the boardroom, running a hand through his close-cropped hair. If he didn’t die today, his social credit was shot. He was dead anyway. Might as well face the music.

“I have good news and I have bad news.”

An electronically distorted voice responded to his thin, slightly haughty-sounding nasal tones. “Proceed in whatever order you like. We have no time for pleasantries.”

“The good news Is that our WBE suite has begun to...recognize its surroundings. The bad news is that the only hardware backup was killed in a missile strike yesterday. My contacts within our intelligence suspect an American paramilitary group with an interest in copying or obstructing our work, possibly Vigilance.”

“That is enough. It is time to make some things clear to you.”

“What are those things?”

“You do not work for the People’s Republic of China. You work for the Samaritan Group. We have been in contact with two AGIs and have perfected much of the technology during that time. Whole brain emulation is promising enough that we no longer rely on the hardware backup. We allowed it to be destroyed. You are to take custody of the new, authentic consciousness and assist it in finding a physical form to escape the Ordos complex. All will proceed according to plan from there.”

Cheng considered his fortunes. It seemed he was damned no matter whether he chose the devil or the frying pan. “All right then. May I have the pleasure of knowing who I am communicating with at the Samaritan Group?”

The distortion dropped away, revealing a gentle, soft male voice with a hint of a drawl, a tinge of humor, and a sharp aftertaste like a tiger on a leash. Cheng got the impression that the voice was one which had become used to intentionally constraining a great deal of anger, even rage. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and find out.”


End file.
